How Much do You Care?: Mining and Analysis of Tweets Pertaining to Health Issues
B Naga Harish, Kumari Reena, Suman Kumar, Jiling Zhong · 2018
Online social network presents an effective platform to understand the mass behavior of people which help us come up with strategies to inform, engage and organize people. Health care is one of the key domains where social network has emerged to be a very effective tool for bringing awareness about a variety of issues. In this paper, our focus is on the discussions on health issues taking place on Twitter®11Twitter is a registered trademark. Text data on prevalent health issues, namely, heart disease, obesity, breast cancer, COPD, diabetes, and HIV is mined over a month and then analyzed. The paper presents a comparative analysis of the extent of the user engagement on Twitter involving these issues. Measurements of over or under representation of the health issues are presented by comparing real world mortality of the issue and its corresponding tweet volume. Sentiment analysis and classification of the tweets are presented to reflect public moods and themes of public interests including news and advertisements. Presented study not only sheds some light on contemporary state of user engagement but also it may help various interested entities to design more appropriate public engagement strategies.